Jie Jie Qing Promo Video 节节清宣传片

The Jie Jie Qing promo video, with a couple shots of me in it. I know many of the people in the video as well as the lyricist. That was a fun production.More about Jie Jie Qing later.Video:
http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/wR0DMVYOamk/

Tea Destinations: Wuyi Mountain 武夷山 Part 2

Processing Yancha

Lounging in a
swank teahouse, perching on wooden log in our favorite tea shop, or even
nesting on our living room sofa, might we sample and compare, gaiwan after
gaiwan, teapot after teapot, varied styles of Wuyi Yancha. However, in this
comfortable, leisurely process, little are we aware or appreciative of the
total, collective effort put into each single tea leaf.

Focusing on a
single aspect, the observable changes to the tea leaf as it undergoes the stages
of processing, I spent an entire night in the tea factory, taking photos of
Zhengyan Shuixian
正岩水仙.

While most
visitors probably won’t want to spend a night at a tea factory (it’s a simple
brick and concrete workspace, not designed for comfortable living), if you’re
unlucky enough like me, stranded in the Tian Xin Cun 天心村tea village (until a particular batch of tea leaves were ready
for transport the next day), you might get a glimpse of life inside the tea
factory, and learn something about tea processing methods. Of course, you will
also hear the unending ka-chunk and whir of the tea machines necessary for
modern, large batch tea processing.

Journey of the Leaf

Tea is picked in
the tea gardens, where soon after the sacs are immediately shipped to the
factory. Upon reaching the factory, the leaves are dumped onto the factory
floor to relax. They might be arranged into neat rows; but if there is just too
much leaf, they’re just left in a huge, flat pile. Occasionally, the leaves are
flipped to allow even exposure to air. When the withering machines are ready, tea
leaves are scooped into bamboo baskets using a woven bamboo scooping basket, or
simply grabbed with the hands, then placed into the rows of withering/shaking
machines. A bucket of hot charcoal supplies heat to each machine as the leaves
undergo withering and fermentation/oxidation in the shaking machine, a process
lasting the entire night. The force (speed) of shaking and duration are all
controlled by an experienced tea master. It’s during the shaking and
fermentation stage that oolong tea develops its characteristic aroma. After
alternately shaking leaves and letting them relax, the leaves slowly wilt and
leaf edges turn brown.

The leaves here
are noticeably brown on the edges, while most of the leaf still retains its
green luster.

Taking fermented
leaf out of the shaking machines, the workers dump the leaves into piles on
plastic sheets to relax a bit. From there, they go to the tea fixation machine,
where the leaves are fired at very high temperature to stop enzymatic processes
in the leaves.

As soon as the leaves come out of the fixation machine, while still hot, in small batches,
they’re put into the rolling machine which expresses the juices from the
leaves, and breaks down the cell walls. At this point, the leaves take on a
rolled appearance, and are quite moist and sticky when touched. After rolling,
the leaves are left to relax and cool in piles on plastic sheets, awaiting the
drying machine.

Leaves come out of
the drying machine, with a changed, darker appearance, feeling dry to the touch;
although the stems still feel slightly moist, not extremely rigid and brittle. They’re
then piled on plastic sheets to relax again. The dried leaves, having the faint
scent of autumnal leaf, are now ready for test brewing and enjoyment. Instead
of leaf, I opted for the stems only just to see what they could do. Surprisingly,
the steeped stems of this Zhengyan Shuixian were very good for the first 2
infusions, but became weaker and uninteresting over subsequent brews. The
workers however, had a surprised look on their faces and laughed when they realized
they were drinking stem infusions, appreciative of the flavor. Of course, the
brewed leaves were all that much more fantastic. I saw workers take a few
handfuls of the freshly made Zhengyan Shuixian, perhaps to enjoy later.

This freshly dried
maocha will later be de-stemmed entirely by hand, a painstaking process, separating
each individual leaf from the stem, discarding yellow, ugly leaves and useless
stems (although the stems might be swept up and collected for use in tea
pillows). After de-stemming, a task often seen in tea shops, the leaves must
undergo roasting to further develop flavor and aroma in the leaf while also
turning the leaves a dark brown-black color from the brown-green.

Roasted Infusion, Maocha Infusion

Returning toFuzhoufrom Wuyishan, I had a chance to sample the already roasted leaves of Shuixian –
how spectacular the taste was, and completely different from the green leaves
of maocha that we enjoyed in the tea factories in Wuyi. The tone, ambience, sensation,
flavor, scent of tea evolves as time advances…

Tea Destinations: Wuyi Mountain 武夷山

Recently, I took a
trip toWuyiMountain; not to view scenery, but to experience
Wuyi oolong tea picking and processing methods.

Picking Zheng Yan
Rou Gui Tea採正岩肉桂茶

To pick tea, one
needs to actually get to the location of the tea bushes first. In some places,
where there are roads, it’s a simple, convenient task. But to pick Zhengyan
tea, I had to be led in through Wuyi mountains by my friend Wang Yu Long and
two of the master tea pickers and porters. We started out at the base in the
Wuyi Scenic Area, although not on a path that tourists normally take, walking
along narrow, sometimes treacherous mountain paths, slick with rain from the
night before. I carried a camera, and nothing else; needless to say, I was
totally unprepared for the experience. A porter was carrying large plastic sacs
and bamboo carrying rods; another carried the tea picking machine, which was
readied at the base. Wang Yu Long carried nothing, except a straw sun hat.

Ok, I knew it
would be a long walk into where we were going. I was told the night before that
it was a nearly two-hour walk. But what no one told me was how steep and
difficult to cross those narrow paths could be. I thought Wang Yu Long was
joking when he said we had to “jump” across a river; I later realized it was no
joke. (In Canada, I lived in the mountains of Northern Ontario during my
childhood – often wandering around “discovering” what I could regardless of
whether there was any path or not. The
experience was familiar, yet I admit it, I was out of shape!)

Breathless, as I
staggered to the untouched tea garden on the mountain top, the tea masters
soberly stated they make the same trip every day, at least once a day (I later
witnessed them make the same trip up 3 times that same day.)

As you might
gather, picking tea is a laborious process – and the conditions must be exactly
right. During my visit to Wuyi, it rained, almost every day. We were lucky
because the sun was shining that day, so the tea leaves would be dry when
picked. Picking tea when there is still dew on the leaves is not ideal; picking
tea when the leaves are wet with rain is also imperfect. (I was told, many tea
factories are unwilling to buy rain soaked tea leaves, even at a low price,
because the final quality of the processed tea leaf suffers).

With sun beating
down, the men set about attaching the long nylon sac to the tea picking
machine, which would neatly contain the picked tea. In the distance, I could
see a group of 5 women, hand-picking tea from the same field. They were not,
however, the beautiful young maidens romanticized in Chinese tea picking songs,
they were old-looking women, well experienced tea pickers, whose hands were
worn from picking tea nearly every day during tea picking season. Their index
and pinky fingers were taped to protect from cuts one could endure from
repetitively plucking tea stems.

You might think
that hand-picked tea, a somewhat quixotic notion, is superior to
machine-picked, but in reality, both obtain the same objective – to remove
green leaf and green stems from the tea bushes. The picking machine, requiring
3 people to handle it, does a much quicker job, requiring less manpower than a
large group of tea pickers that would be otherwise necessary to do the same
job. When you have a few thousand pounds of raw green leaf to be picked from
the tea bushes (which must all be processed the same day) – you need an
efficient solution like a tea harvesting machine.

After closer
inspection of the tea pickers, I noticed they weren’t daintily picking the tea
with their fingertips, slicing leaves off with sharp fingernails, as sometimes
described (which might be so for green tea), instead, they were grasping
bunches of leaves from the bushes, pulling them with long green stems intact,
then placing into bamboo baskets.

By this time, the
tea picking machine was working, harvesting a whole row of tea in just seconds,
making two passes of the same row so both left and right sides were picked. By
the time several rows of green leaves were bagged, weighed, and bundled for the
ascent down the mountain, we all sat down for a break, thirsty from physical
labor. I followed Wang Yu Long down a mountain path, to fetch mountain spring
water, which we collected into “previously enjoyed” plastic water bottles used
by the tea pickers in our company. It then dawned on me that everything these
tea pickers needed for the day had to be hand-carried in – including their
lunch.

After we all had a
drink of water, fed from water cascading off a rock cliff high above some tea
bushes, the porters hefted their bundles of tea onto their shoulders, leaving a
small group of us behind to continue tea picking. For some reason, we were
short of laborers that day; the supervisor was frantically working her cell
phone, trying to round up more laborers to carry loads of tea down the
mountain. I could hear her repeatedly saying “you’re totally mental” in the
Wuyi Minbei dialect, a sign of her desperateness.

I left the
hand-picking to the experts, since I didn’t bring any tape for my fingers
anyway. Wang Yu Long 王裕龍 however, volunteered me into action with the tea picking
machine, collecting the harvested tea into the large plastic sacs, which when
full, are quite heavy. As I watched the harvest, I noticed the curved blade of
the tea picking machine only harvesting from the tops of the tea bushes. The
sides and ends were left untouched; I then realized this is where the tea
pickers were harvesting tea from. So tea harvesting seems to require a
complement of both hand and machine harvesting to fully get the job done. Both
hand-picked and machine harvested tea piles were mixed together in the tea sacs;
they weren’t differentiated or treated separately – except on the factory
floor, they would be separated as they all came from one specific location – Ma
Tou Yan馬頭岩. Ma Tou Yan’s Rou Gui tea肉桂茶produces the most superb rou gui tea; although, rou
gui tea as a varietal tea bush is now grown throughout the Wuyi area. But the
very best Cliff Proper Rou Gui (Zheng Yan Rou Gui)正岩肉桂, which we happened to be picking, comes from the
precise area we were harvesting from, Horse Head Cliff (Ma Tou Yan).

After one pass
over a row of tea bushes, a sac of freshly plucked tea leaves had to be filled, hefted back to our
collecting station by me as I ran through rows of tea to be ready for the
second pass of the tea cutting crew. Bundles and bundles of tea piled up at the
collection station, yet there were still no porters to carry the now wilting
leaves down to the factory. Finally, the porters arrived with take-out boxes of
spicy meat, vegetables and rice; typical Wuyi fast food. As we sat down on the
bare ground to rest and eat our lunch, the porters hefted the remaining sacs of
tea away. Then it was time to complete the process of tea picking and gathering
into sacs until that particular mountain field was completely harvested, a task
fully taking the whole day to complete.

After our
supervisor was satisfied the field was fully harvested, she allowed us to
leave. I followed Wang Yu Long down the mountain, each carrying a manageable
size sac of tea, since we had no bamboo carrying poles. As we walked along, I
shuddered at the thought of having to “jump” across a river with a sac of tea
on my shoulders. I wondered how the porters managed to handle two sacs of tea,
100 pounds in total. Did they fly across the river? Later, I cruelly realized,
there was an alternate gentler, wider path, we took down the mountain, across
field after field of Zheng Yan tea bushes, through sculptured, scenic mountain
cliffs and gorges. We passed numerous crews of tea harvesters. They looked at
me, a foreigner, darkened, sunburned, dirty, somewhat mockingly asking “Is Wuyi
Mountain fun?” To which I somberly replied, “Tea picking is weary.”

After a week of
reflection, I came back fully appreciative of the laborious, physically
demanding task of tea picking on distant Wuyi mountain summits.Now, I have a
totally new perspective when I sit down to drink Zhengyan Yancha 正岩茶, or Cliff
Proper Rock Tea. I also have a much deeper respect for what
Heaven,
Earth and
Man has coaxed into each single leaf. Tea production, even with machinery is
still a very labor intensive task. The spectacular sweet nectar coaxed drip by
drip from a fist-sized zisha teapot into our delicate porcelain cups is not
just a product of nature but an expression of love and dedication of those in
the Tea World.

Midnight in Fuzhou

Ok, I'm an author now, and there's tons of stuff I have to do now - author stuff. Where do I start? A little music helps. It keeps me energized. I'm listing to Chae Yan right now. Book marketing stuff is keeping me busy - lots of questions I have to write and answer. I want to go out and have some fun once in awhile - but no time - at least not in Fuzhou. When can I go back to Wuyi mountain again? I miss the spicy

Latest fan comments

Log in to alivenotdead.com with one of these trusted providers

NOTE: Users of the original website please Click here to reactivate your account.

New users - Join the alivenotdead.comcommunity instantly by confirming your identity with a trusted authentication service.

Returning users - Please use with the same authentication service to login to your alivenotdead.com account.

First time users can create a new account from scratch by authenticate using any of the following trusted services:

WARNING: If you disconnect all your social media accounts your profile will be locked and you will not be able to access it again. If you want to keep your page, please add another social media account and then remove this one.

If you understand the risks, click this box to deauthorize your account.